Midsize musical companies delight in new hall

November 02, 2003|By John von Rhein, Tribune music critic.

Long frustrated in their efforts to secure a high-quality, centrally located venue in downtown Chicago they can call their own, the midsize musical organizations that are among the founding companies of the Joan W. and Irving B. Harris Theater for Music and Dance regard the handsome new hall's gala opening on Saturday night as a watershed event.

And while the needs of Chicago Opera Theater, the Chicago Sinfonietta, Performing Arts Chicago, Music of the Baroque and the Lyric Opera Center for American Artists vary from group to group, they are united by their common quest for a state-of-the-art performance space that is worthy of the music they produce.

The theater's principal tenant, Chicago Opera Theater, has for decades been forced to make do with cramped, aging auditoriums such as the Athenaeum Theatre that have proved woefully inadequate to meet its needs, hampering its efforts to build audiences and widen its contributor base and even forcing a degree of artistic compromise on the 29-year-old company.

In its new home at Millennium Park, COT will see its seating capacity jump by more than one-third, from a capacity of 960 at the Athenaeum to 1,452 seats at the Harris. This, plus the increased comfort, accessibility and eye appeal of the downtown theater, will enable the company to satisfy the cravings of opera-mad Chicagoans in much greater numbers during those spring months when the Lyric Opera is dark, according to COT general director Brian Dickie.

"Anything that contributes to widening our audience and the opportunities of opera lovers to see what we do can only be a good thing," Dickie says. "Suddenly people will know where we are and find it easy to get to us. It will give our performers a degree of comfort they've never known anywhere else in the city. What we are doing in the new theater will, I think, be widely recognized as something central to what is going on in the performing arts world of Chicago."

Test audience

Meanwhile, Performing Arts Chicago, the city's independent presenter of music, theater and modern dance, is moving three concerts by its Fulcrum Point New Music Project into the hall beginning in January, testing audience response before deciding whether to present more attractions there in 2004-05. The Chicago Sinfonietta is doing much the same thing.

For years the scarcity of appropriate midsize halls forced Performing Arts Chicago to lead a nomadic lifestyle, booking its attractions just about anywhere artists and audiences could be accommodated -- churches, ballrooms, storefronts. Its lack of a clearly defined presence in the Michigan Avenue cultural corridor not only hindered PAC's marketing efforts but also sent confusing messages to the funding community.

Which is why Susan Lipman, PAC's long-suffering executive director, is breathing one big sigh of relief right now.

"The original purpose behind this project was to provide stability to organizations such as ours that lacked a centrally located, permanent home in downtown Chicago," she says. "Our hope is that, as a consequence of our participating in this new venue, we can help each other build audiences." Not for a moment do Dickie, Lipman and their fellow executives suggest that shifting performances from other venues to Millennium Park will solve every problem facing them at a time when most not-for-profit arts organizations are grappling with deficits, aging and declining audiences and other issues.

But they all believe the Harris Theater's size, seating capacity, location, high-tech facilities and modern acoustics will enable them to produce their best work, and that this will be reflected in a dramatic upsurge of earned income -- music to the ears of any non-profit.

In fact, this has already happened at COT, Dickie reports. Months before September, when the company mailed its season brochure to subscribers, it had already sold more subscriptions than had been sold during the entire previous year. "And we have already taken in more than 80 percent of the money, compared with last year," the general director says.

Not that he's being complacent: The company will have to earn some $500,000 more at the box office than last year just to recoup the huge price differential between presenting opera downtown and at the Athenaeum. All companies that rent the Harris Theater are charged $4,000 a day, which is more than it cost COT to rent the Athenaeum for an entire week of rehearsals and performances.

Raising money

Another $500,000 of COT's 2004 budget of $3.3 million will have to be raised in contributions. Dickie believes COT's finally having a prestigious downtown address has "colossal potential to get increased contributions from the corporate area" but he concedes that doing so will involve "a massive leap of faith by everybody concerned." Still, he adds, "we think the combination of a handsome new theater and its location, plus the attractiveness of our 2004 season, will enable us to broaden our base of support and put us over the top."